Archive for November 2014

Blogging my thoughts: Divine Performative Promises 15. Nov. 2014
I’ve worked and reworked my book on Creation via Language over and over again for many years, after taking John Searles’ language philosophy class and hearing about his supernatural declarations, which for him merely constituted a thought experiment. Then I became discouraged with my work in the book and I thought, “Good thing I did not publish it, because God’s speaking seems inadequate, to say the least, in the face of evolution and the physics of this universe.”
But today I started thinking that perhaps God’s speaking is enfleshed, embodied, and concrete and, for example, the development of God’s thought could be the evolution of plants and animals on this earth biologically and, in the more elemental physics of God’s thoughts, they could become manifest in the big bang, the expanding universe, the galaxies, their black holes, the solar systems in those galaxies, our own particular “third rock from the sun” — our planet, earth and our very own moon.
When I was saying that Christ is the Word of God and (continuing with Luther), that we become Christs, by God’s grace, and therefore we too become Words of God, and then (I extrapolated and I wrote in Creation via Language) we do become the vocabulary, the living biological vocabulary of God’s language in a new social syntax.
Now language is an organic system that abstracts from our socio-biological reality of being human, but in terms of Hegel’s concrete spirit, language can incorporate, can become filled with its referents thereby becoming socio-biological and physical, in terms of the physics used to understand our universe. In God’s speaking everything into creation and thus into its existence, the theological comes into play.
In an analogy, an author can write a story, which is more abstract than if as a playwright he or she writes a play with real actors on the stage. At that level the author is thinking in terms of persons, (the terms as the persons) their relationships, and the speaking has gone up into the grammar or syntax of a plot, in which an acted story moves to its climax and dénouement from the in medias res in which it was begun to its end in the same.
Now people leading their daily lives and experiencing crises and their resolutions by calling upon God in their distress and being rescued and then embarking on the plan of God’s salvation, are on another level from a play performed by actors, in which life and death are merely imagined. In our real lives there are also stories and plays in which they take place, but pace Christian Scientists, people really live and die. But people could live in the Gospel in God’s speaking, in divine speech-acts, language acts, language events, and the salvation history in which they are nested, and continue in the Holy Spirit’s continuous creation (the living theology of God’s thought brought to speech) and continuous incarnation, as we live out the Gospel stories again and again in becoming Christs, the Words of God addressed to one another, the performative promises of God’s people in but not of this world.